Human
by nicoco the marshmellow
Summary: What started out as an original short story but became a nasty trick to be played on my creative writing teacher. Angst-riddled, Schuldich pov, non-yaoi fic.


"Human" Weiss Kreuz non-yaoi ficcie by Nicoco the Marshmellow.  
  
**Other character is Yoji, by the way. This was originally meant to be an original short story for creative writing class that was purposely turned into a fanfic. Why? My teacher was well aware of mine and my friend's anime obsession and always complained that our original stories were too "anime- ish". Stories about a homosexual Lucifer, a 'Disco Strangler' (teehee), and various other abominations were too "Japanese-cartoon-ish" for his liking. So, we both wrote fanfics (my friend wrote a really creepy Bradley Crawlie- sama fic) and Mr. Anime-hating-teacher thought "Wow, good original stuff!" o_O And that is the moronic story behind this little abomination of mental health.I just like saying abomination...makes me feel smart and vocabulary- full .  
  
The city below lives and breathes like a giant, concrete monster. Its street lane veins flow thick with the noxious blood of car exhaust, its gleaming scales of skyscraper windows and barred teeth of lampposts are threatening, frightful to the eye. I stare upon the monster now from one of its many skyscrapers. The air is thin, hard to breathe. Wind whips my face and invites my hair to dance. Through the living veil of crimson strands I stare at the man whom I have brought here. Even from this height, even as we stand on the edge of building and air, even as his jade eyes stare straight down at the monster, he smiles. The smile on my face widens for I know the source of the seemingly childish happiness.  
  
This situation began with nothing more than a dream. A dream not dreamt by myself but by the man who was a stranger until today. In this dream, I watched as the man stood at the edge of a cliff that overlooked an endless expanse of fields thick with flowers. The pinks, yellows, whites and violets of blooming petals proved almost too much for the eyes, so bright, blissful and intoxicating like the finest liquor for the senses. Opposed to the bliss and behind the man was the ominous knot of black thorn bushes, home to black roses in full bloom. The dull maze of the thorns and roses drowned out the very blue of the sky and sucked the clouds into their colorless filter. The man had his back to this mess in the dream. He had eyes only for the fields. And so he closed his eyes. Then he stretched his arms out to his sides like wings. Then he smiled. Then he jumped. Then he woke up, disappointed and tired having flown but not landed.  
  
Humans are violent creatures, by nature or by instinct I suppose. Am I human? Perhaps. Perhaps only my body born of a mother can be called human. Either way I can tell you the violence in which people live for I have seen the essence of it not with my eyes but with my mind. Through the clarity of my mind I have felt the burning pain of violated virgins, tasted the blood at the lips of teenagers fighting in parking lots, smelt the scent of sweat on children and heard the last thoughts of a murder victim. Violence. Violence towards their own or others and towards themselves and nobody all at once. Violence all for nothing. Violence in the pursuit of some proof of existence. "I love you" is their proof that they are loved no matter how empty the words seem yet people fight to be loved and cherished. Those three words are their only proof, but yet they feel they've proven their worth. Scientists and the like desecrate the holy places of nature, the tombs of forgotten ghosts and the very skies and seas all in a blind rush for some proof of something, anything. Everyone, no matter how happy or miserable, is looking for some kind of proof that they are needed, loved, superior, intelligent, etc.  
  
That is what led me to this man. This man seeks no proof for he has seen death with his eyes as I have with my mind. I can taste funeral flowers in his mind as I invade it. There is no longing for love, no longing for knowledge or power within his mind. Simply an all consuming quiet, a patient waiting through life dominated by nothing but loss. He has given up the pursuit of truth for he believes he had found it and lost it.  
  
He looks at me now through his short, chestnut colored hair whipping about his handsome face in the powerful currents of wind. His eyes are clouded but his mind is clear. Perhaps he knows why I have brought him here.  
  
Why, the question I had answered after I had seen his dreamscape. I wanted to give this man what he wanted for it was not violent like the other countless people who's thoughts are an open book to me. The people who I pass in the streets and who's minds I invade unnoticed all rush and surge forward to some goal they deem important, some inanimate thing or desire that they believe will make them great or loved. Yet this man's thoughts are empty, uncaring and cold. The frigid planes of his mind made shivers run down my spine in delighted ripples as his dream unraveled behind the lids of my eyes. The likeness of him to me, of myself to him, we're so similar in our coldness. Yes, I had to help this man.  
  
So, as I saw him in the late afternoon on the park bench with a cigarette between his fingers, I approached him. Oh, there was the initial suspicion, fear, caution and unwillingness when I first asked him "Have you fallen off the cliff yet?" He stared at me, his face expressionless but inside his head was a mosaic of questions. I took the cigarette between his fingers and took a deep drag, flicking the wasted filter away absently. I stroked his cheek gently with the back of my finger and laughed as he pushed me away, not comfortable with the touch of another man but ashamed at the comfort the simple touch brought him, like the soothing stroke of a mother's hand. "I know things about you," I told him. "Things you may never know." Yes, he was fearful. But his curiosity got the better of him. He followed obediently as I led him out of the tree-shaded shelter of the park and into the blinding noise of the city streets. He continued to follow quietly as we entered a large business building and moved through the lobby unnoticed. As we entered through the polished elevator doors, I looked into the eyes of his reflection on the metallic doors.  
  
"Schuldich."  
  
His face jerked toward me. "What?" he asked, his face blank as his inner thoughts whirled in frenzy.  
  
I smirked at him. "My name. It's Schuldich. You keep calling me 'Stranger' or 'this man'." My eyes gleamed playfully at him, almost mockingly. "I like to be on a first name basis with people."  
  
He continued to look at me. He had not uttered a word nor asked any question out loud. After a few moments of hesitation he spoke.  
  
"Schuldich?" He repeated the name uncertainly. "What sort of name is that?" "German. 'Schuld' is the German word for guilt or blame. My name is derived from that."  
  
The man nodded blankly, absorbing but the answer was not to the more important questions in his head.  
  
His thoughts screamed "Why has he brought me here?" "How does he know about my dream?" and finally, the suspicion laced question "How can he read my thoughts?" I laughed then, seeing the reluctance in his mind to actually believe I was hearing his every thought. I told him then of the talent I was born with. "It has its drawbacks," I'd said as I strolled confidently to the very ledge of the roof after the elevator had "bleeped" our destination and the shimmering doors were pushed aside. "It sometimes becomes difficult to know which thoughts are mine and which are those of others around me, but telepathy does provide amusement every now and again."  
  
My mind is brought back to the present. Not much has changed in these tense minutes of silence. Still we stand, unmoving save for the rapid dance of our hair, staring downward at the traffic, the pedestrians and pigeons. I'm waiting for the moment in which it will happen, the event that was fuel that turned the mechanisms of my actions to bring about this situation.  
  
Closing my eyes, I extend my grasp and reach into his mind, to see what is going through it. His eyes see the bliss of the fields below and the ominous thorns behind him. Not the monster of the city or the horizon of gray concrete structures for those images are lost to him in this instant. He stands not on the very skull of a steel boned building but on a cliff overlooking miles upon miles of flowers. My smile widens but its quality changes slightly from that of playfulness to a smirk tinged with guilt. I'm the one transmitting this to him, making him see what I know he's seen and what I know he wants to see now. That is why he smiles but not why I do. I find humor in this peculiar situation because of my name. I've never felt guilty for what I am but I do now, all because right now I am two people. Our minds are joined and his thoughts are mine and I am in control. Yet this guilt fills me, its reason out of my grasp. Perhaps my other self holds the answer.  
  
His face is blissful as a child who sits doing nothing but has found some secret source of amusement or security. I pull out of his thoughts and watch him with my "normal" eyes. I look at him, seeing the resemblance between he and I. His eyes are what strike me most, deep jade much like the emerald of my own irises. There is also a deeper sameness found in those eyes; eyes that have seen death, his the death of a lover, mine the death of humanity. Eyes that have cried tears for what is lost, mine for what was never there. Neither set of eyes has sought out proof for neither has felt that life has held little more than time and waiting. Both have seen human violence but not been vicious, willing participants of it.  
  
He's beautiful in his coldness, the way he's closed himself off from everything but his lost love. He's distant from the rest of humanity and can see the violence without need of a sugar coating for he has managed to draw apart from the rest of them. As he stands with me, his lips parted in a smile as he gazes downward, oblivious to everything but his dream, I can't help but admire the calmness of his being. For that if for nothing else he is beautiful.  
  
The situation is about to end. This is what he has spent his life waiting for and what I had wanted to bring about. My breath catches at the sight, familiar but so different. He closes his eyes. Mine remain open. Then he stretches his arms out to his sides like wings. Mine remain immobile.  
  
Then he smiles. My smile fades. Then he jumps. I remain. He does not wake. I watch him fly.  
  
The dream to him is real for I have made it so. I watch him fall with morbid fascination. I breathe deeply as I feel the wind whip his skin in a burning friction as he draws closer to the bliss of his fields and nothing else matters.  
  
People are screaming now. In a single instant the street has erupted in chaos. The blood has stopped pumping through monster veins and new blood has now begun to flow in gentle currents of crimson. Blindly I see an ambulance come to do nothing more than take the remains away. Traffic resumes and spectators continue on their way, the violence noted, recorded and left unnoticed as it is forgotten in their minds.  
  
As I watch my face is grim. I'd watched him fall, felt his happiness at what awaited him. He embraced it. Perhaps deep inside him he had known that it was in fact an illusion. He had not cared for his life's wait was ended and death had embraced him with gentle, rose petal wings.  
  
For a moment in time his eyes met mine as he tumbled downward. His eyes were wet from the fierce wind and from the joy within him. He thanked me with those eyes and not his mind for I had drawn myself out of him to watch. The green pools had thanked mine and then closed as their lids bit the pavement below.  
  
Now the situation I had organized and brought about has ended. Not as satisfactory as I had hoped. I sigh, tired, looking down at the drying crimson pool far down below.  
  
"I've given you the fields..." my voice falters, the words themselves being lost to the wind. They seem meaningless now. As I shove my hands in my pockets and take one last glance at the ground, my mind reels with what I believe are my thoughts and not the ghost of his. "I've given you the fields but I regret for at the last moment you were alone. I had planned to follow you." I rub my forehead, my hand hiding the red pavement and I am thankful for that small comfort.  
  
As I step through the threshold of the elevator, the corners of my lips twitch slightly. "That is my guilt, the guilt of both the success and failure of violence." Sadly, I let the curtain of my hair fall across my face as I stare placidly at the polished floor of the elevator. "At least now I know I'm human." 


End file.
